Why I No Longer Talk to Westerns About Peace (And what can be done to start talking about it again)

While traveling and especially while hiking, sleeping in hostels or guest houses, you talk to all sorts of people. It was mid-April, probably the best season in Northern Spain, and my first meaningful conversation on the Camino del Norte was with an Irish author, just before descending to a beautiful coastal town named Zarautz.

It took less than an introduction for him to tell me all about his life – growing up in Northern Ireland, training as a priest, writing a textbook about conflict analysis, and raising his three children who would yell at him for talking to “a baby killer” from Israel. But although his daughters wouldn’t approve, he spent the next few days walking with me, and we parted with my promise to visit his cottage in France. 

The second encounter was with a Dutchman, probably about my parents’ age. Hearing I’m from Israel resulted in a somewhat awkward silence, broken by his statement that wars are awful, so we should not have them in the first place. It was a too-obvious saying (I mean, who WANTS war?), but escalated to claiming The West should not have funded Ukraine, because if they had no ammunition, they could not fight, resulting in fewer casualties.
The conversation didn’t get too deep, and I called him “the man who thought there should be no war,” judging his naivety. However, I realized he was a representative of a larger phenomenon, as this was not the first (nor last) time I heard such opinions while meeting fellow travelers.

It might have been a coincidence, but maybe there was more to it—how come only The Irish Writer seemed so willing to see the complexity, while others simplified it to the point where meaningful discussion was impossible?

Armed Conflict and Democracy

Those who had the opportunity to think about similar matters surely have felt there must be a connection between peace and democracy. Indeed, the subject occupied many sociologists, who came up with two competing theories. The first being the “Democratic Peace Theory”, claiming democratic states are less likely to engage in armed conflict with other democracies, and the second is the “Territorial Peace Theory” suggesting the opposite – peace is a cause for a democracy. But even if those terms are unfamiliar or those theories sound too academic, the correlation is undeniable – peace is related to democracy, and people who live in a Western country are very unlikely to experience the tragedy of war. 

If you never thought about this before and need further convincing, you can look at a list of wars in the last 20 years on Wikipedia (in which it is hard to find any war taking place in a Western country), or read the analysis I made using open-source data, finding very few incidents of armed conflicts involving The West. Those incidents, exceptions, were one-time tragic events that cannot be considered as conflict or even an ongoing state of danger.
The statistics are hard to argue with—most Westerners cannot remember a state of armed conflict in their history. The wars they do remember were never close to home, only on foreign soils, and only in theory. Indeed, when the Russia-Ukrainian war started, as an Oxford University graduate I witnessed many European friends disbelieving that such tragedy could actually happen to a country moments away from joining the EU.
It is no coincidence, then, that those who have never struggled with the reality of war are unable to imagine its necessity—they never needed to ask themselves what they would do under a life-threatening attack and never sacrificed anything for their theoretical values.
When those values are “pro-Palestinian”, they are often represented on social media as simplistic messages – “Free Palestine!”, “Stop the Genocide”, “Ceasefire Now!”.
When they are “pro-Israeli”, you see “F*ck Hamas” and “Never Again” circling.
Even written news articles, which are supposed to be more elaborate than the average post, usually lack background, context, or disclaimers. Hence, as many people never experienced any conflict, and their feeds are flooded with partial truths and short one-sided banners, why am I really surprised their conclusions are as simple as the contents of their bubbles?
Stuck on these wonders, I stumbled upon a phrase that helped me sort through this internal dispute. 

 

Peace Privilege 

It’s been more than five years since Cristal Palacios Yumar tweeted about her frustration about people unable to understand how it is to live in a conflict, claiming the phrase “peace privilege” that was then lost in the depths of the internet. 

The context of the tweet to a historical event isn’t clear – she talks about the Venezuelan presidential crisis, and the connection was made only through a follow-up article published on a niche website called Caracas Chronicles, a blog focused on discussing Venezuelan news and analysis in English. It’s rare to find truly timeless pieces related to current affairs, but Yumar’s opinion, The Trap of ‘Peace Privilege’ can be re-published in relation to every modern-day conflict with only minor changes – such as replacing names, locations, numbers, and specific examples.

In a world where the phrase ‘___ privilege’ is increasingly popular in the media and public discourse, it’s surprising that ‘peace privilege’ didn’t get as much traction. Perhaps Yumar’s audience was too small, with only 2K followers today and probably less back in 2019, or maybe it contains a message too difficult to accept – it’s impossible to understand the true nature of a certain conflict without knowing its history and origin.

 

When I bind it all together, something clears up. It is hard, borderline impossible, to understand all the nuances without experiencing the complexity of conflict. Knowing something is not understanding, and while it is not anyone’s fault, acknowledging this gap is essential to continue having mutual conversations that will not leave one side feeling helpless. If you’re hearing about a problem for the first time on social media, the character limit or a 30-second TikTok will never be enough to understand it fully. 

Realizing this helped me understand why I stopped opening up to strangers abroad, started avoiding conversation or simplified my opinions to words like “it’s tragic”, or “yes, nobody wants this”. I am not happy about this result, and I hate that it can sound like I’m discouraging speaking up for social injustice – free speech is a cornerstone of Western society. So how do we solve this deadlock? The answer is not clear to me, but maybe this could be a start – before drawing solid conclusions, please, listen to the voices that are truly suffering (on all sides), learn more about their history, and approach this unfamiliar territory with an open and critical mind, all while still remembering the huge privilege of living in peace.